Day 325: Smile at service workers

Smile at service workers. At bartenders. At bus drivers.

Say good morning, smile, and most importantly, look at this person with whom you are involved in an interaction, however minor the interaction may be.

Some people do this. As they step onto the bus they hold their driver momentarily in attention, they acknowledge the driver's presence, briefly, as a whole human being with emotions and thoughts and needs. And the bus driver feels this. Sometimes you are the one to do it, and you see how glum they are beforehand, how lost and pained, trapped in public utterly alone in the prison inside their heads. The light has gone from their eyes.

But when you acknowledge them you sometimes see this light flicker back on.

And sometimes people do it to you, in your job, and it can be enough, sometimes, to pull you out of the ruminating despair or boredom or rage into which your daily life can so easily descend.

That brief holding of another in awareness, it is a hand on the shoulder, reaching through the bars into that dark room of the mind, and a brief message passed from one lifeform to another: I see you, I know you, I understand your struggle, and I am here in it with you.

It is no accident, I submit, that we talk about "holding" someone in awareness. It is a cradling. It is tender. And we all need a little tenderness.

This is your job. Not in the inward-looking meaning of a role you perform in exchange for money. In a deeper way. One to do with things that are hard to talk about - responsibility, citizenship, nobleness. This reality in which we find ourselves, this world, it must be carried from one moment to the next. It is heavy, and we all must lift it together.

When it is light for you, but you see someone else straining under the weight, reach out a hand. Help them. Do not look down at your phone and mumble and brush past them. Do not treat them as set dressing in your vastly more important play. Do not stare blankly across the chasm between you and them, assuming that some wretched failure on their part is crushing them while you, successful and strong, skip free.

That is a way that this beautiful and terrible existence will be lost to all of us.

Smile at service workers. At bartenders. At bus drivers. Reach out a hand. The weight of the world rolls, and where it is heaviest has so little to do with personal choice. Help those who are straining. It costs so little to do, and may in the end mean so much.